“Dead? Yes, I’ve thought of that possibility, but she would never commit suicide. It’s against her religion. Would it help you to know that she was in an institution for a few years? It was a voluntary commitment.”
“What institution?”
“If I had known the name, I would have settled the bill. She never used our insurance policy. She had to be there under an assumed name. My detectives couldn’t find her.”
“So how did you find out she was hospitalized?”
“Word got back to me. I won’t say from whom. It was a private affair, and I am a great respecter of privacy.” He looked away, and then his face came back to her, smiling with a change of subject.
“The man you came with, Charles Butler? I can’t say I know him well. I only saw him at family gatherings, but I did watch him grow up from wedding to wedding, funeral to funeral. I’m sure I remember him far better than he remembers me. He was so remarkable in any company-and I’m not referring to that magnificent nose. I gather he’s not a close friend of yours?”
“He’s a very close friend.” He was her only friend. “Why did you say that?”
“Well, he must be devastated now. I don’t imagine he enjoyed losing you that way.”
“Charles? He understood why I had to leave.”
“You think he understood why he was left to look like a fool in front of all those people?” He put up one hand to silence her, to stop her from denying she had done that. “When Charles was a little boy, his freak intellect made him a thing apart from other children, a different species. The things the normal children did to him-just following their nature, never missing an opportunity to be cruel. But you’re not a child, and you say you’re his friend.”
“I am his friend.”
“I wonder, Mallory. Would he have left you behind?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, but it was. I’ve seen it before, at every wedding and funeral. His mother would shoo him into a crowd of children. The little monsters would torture him for a while, and then they’d run off. He would just stand there, very quiet, with this stunned look in his eyes. I think the cruelty always baffled him. That’s what I saw in his face tonight as we were leaving the ball-he really didn’t understand.”
Gregor Gilette was searching her face, probing her with his eyes. He seemed surprised by what he had just found. “Mallory, you don’t comprehend any of this, do you?‘’ He brought his face closer to hers. ”No, I can see that you don’t.“
Mallory looked down at her watch. “I have to leave now-I’ve got work to do. I’d like to talk to you again. Can I call you?”
“Yes, of course.” He pulled a pen and a card from his pocket and scribbled a telephone number on the back. “I’ll look forward to it.”
Charles stirred in the night, rising to half-consciousness with the light pepper of pebbles on glass. With mild annoyance, he rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. He came rudely awake to the sound of a breaking windowpane, and his eyes snapped open in time to see a dark object fly into the room and land on the carpet amid a sparkling shower of glass.
Well, now he was wide awake. He rushed to the window and threw up the sash, ready with a small store of words Riker had taught him to relieve the angst of just such a moment. He leaned out the window, prepared with an opening gambit to cast aspersions on the parenthood of the rock thrower.
In the street below was a beautiful woman in a shimmering green ball gown. She was standing in the soft rain and staring up at him. The drops pocked her gown with dots of a darker green. Her face was misted and shining, her white skin luminous. Her hair glistened with rain and lamplight. She blew him a kiss, and in the next moment, she was gone, hurrying up the narrow street toward the wide busy lanes and bright lights of Houston. He leaned far out the window and watched until the last bit of her gown had disappeared into a yellow taxi.
When he finally stood back from the window, he wore the most foolish grin a human could wear outside of captivity. His hair was soaked through, and now he realized he was standing on broken glass. It had just dawned on him that his soles were bleeding, when he noticed the object at his feet-masonry which he hoped was a chunk off someone else’s building. A bit of paper was bound to it by string. He knelt down and untied the wet knot, carefully unfolding the limp paper as though it were a precious relic. He lifted his message to the window. By this poor light, he read the words, “I’m sorry.”
When he considered the source, this was nearly poetic. And to think, he had once criticized her for not having a jot of romance in her soul, or for that matter, a soul. And who but Mallory would have come up with the original idea of tendering an apology by rock?
In its original form, the newspaper clipping had been Sabra and Gregor Gilette’s wedding portrait from the society pages. It had shown only a small part of the bride’s face, only one eye unobscured by her flowers. Half that photograph stared back at Emma Sue each night from the ornate picture frame on the bedside table. She had cut off Sabra’s side of it in the way of a jealous lover. How she had hated Gregor’s wife. And yet, perversely, her most prized possession was one of Sabra’s paintings.
In her young years, before she had become a mover and shaker in the New York art world, Emma Sue Hollaran’s taste in art had always run contentedly with reproductions of Americana by the painter from Maine. His work was as quiet and unchallenging as wallpaper in the portraiture of neighbor folk and peaceful landscapes of an America that she never lived in, a made-up place that she might visit for a moment before turning out the lights.
All those years ago when she had seen the first of Sabra’s paintings, she had physically recoiled. It was the shock of cold water and the disorientation of a sleepwalker called rudely awake. It thrilled her. Sabra had painted a place that Emma Sue had known in her fantasies. The work was done in vibrant reds. The upper portion was a jagged raging violence and the lower part, a rolling, bleeding passivity. She stared into the painting, believing for one full second that she might actually enter it.
Untutored in abstract art, she had forced representation onto the canvas, and reorganized the atmosphere of raw sex, until the violence became a tumultuous fiery sky, roaring over the gently sloping earth below. Rushing across the red plain in the distance, coming ever close, was a churning blood storm. This, too, was another country. It was young, and it was passionate. She remembered it well from dark rooms where she had sat alone with imaginary men who really loved her.
The painting had been hung on her bedroom wall all those years ago. Even when she had come to hate Sabra, Emma Sue could never bring herself to destroy the painting. All these years later, she still found herself staring at it for hours, her head pressed into the pillows, hand hesitating on the lamp switch, watching, waiting for the passionate blood storm to come, in the delusion that, for her, it had not already passed her by.
She turned off the lamp and plotted in the dark.
Gregor would be sorry, very sorry.
Mallory had doffed her ball gown and her yellow taxi cab. Long after midnight, she had returned to what she was, a cop in blue jeans, carrying a large gun in a shoulder holster and striding across a rooftop on the east side of town, ten flights in the air.
Riker waved one arm to say hello. He had his binoculars trained down on the roof of Bloomingdale’s across the street. He was focussed on the thing beneath the makeshift canopy of raincoats. The wind whipped at the canopy, and a coat flapped up to expose the mannequin in the silver ball gown. Andrew Bliss was tenderly draping the plastic figure with a raincoat, as though he thought she might be cold.
“Strange little guy,” said Riker.